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Passion Before Profit: our promise to you

We’ve been championing the joy of good wine since 1874, because when you’re passionate about something you want others to feel the love for it as well.

Being a co-operative means we do business differently: our buyers are free to scour the globe for the wines they truly believe in, not ones that make the most profit, from growers who share our belief in quality at every price. And because we don’t need to make money for external shareholders, we put our profits back into fairer prices and better services for you.

Risk-free exploration

We want you to try our wines with confidence. So if you don’t enjoy a bottle for any reason, we want to hear about it and will happily offer a credit, replacement or refund, so you can explore risk-free. Read more about our Society Promise.

Who we are and what we do

We’re an award-winning wine co-operative, owned by our members, for our members. Here’s what that means for you:

Our buyers are free to scour the globe to buy only the wines they truly believe in – not the ones that make the most money, so you can explore and enjoy the very best of the world’s vineyards.

You’ll get a great, guilt-free deal on our wines because we negotiate fair prices for both our members and our growers, and our profits go back into keeping prices fair and service standards high.

Our growers trust us because we pay on time and spend time getting to know them. We’ve nurtured generation-spanning relationships with our growers across the world, while always keeping our ears to the ground to discover dynamic new winemakers.

We don’t answer to anyone but you because we don’t have external shareholders to make money for.

We believe that everyone should be able to experience good wine, so we’ve got a huge range of bottles that won’t break the bank.

We don’t believe in fake discounting, so the price you pay is the fairest, lowest price possible.

We’re able to buy and keep stocks of fine wines when they are first released and to mature them in our cellars until they are ready to drink, thanks to our unique mutual status. Because we don’t need to generate profits for the benefit of shareholders (like other businesses) we are free to invest in guaranteeing future drinking enjoyment for our members.

Our Buyers

We’re privileged to have the most experienced buying team in the business, with well over a century of wine-buying experience between them. They are briefed only to buy wines that they believe in, and that they think you’ll love too, so they are free to explore rare parcels and unusual styles alongside well-known favourites, and only from producers whose strict codes of integrity match our own. Get to know more about our buyers online with Travels in Wine, where we’ve got plenty of stories about their adventures across the globe.

‘The Wine Society is a special place with a unique ethos which I am deeply passionate about and one that seems more and more compelling with every day I work here. There really is no other organisation that can put wine quality before profit or growth. This means the Buyers enjoy immense freedom and independence, choosing wines because they are delicious, distinctive and good value, and not because they come from a fancy marketing brand.’
Pierre Mansour, Head of Buying